Effective email marketing means lots more work, says Rob Smith, digital director at Blueleaf. Here are three key factors to ensure your email content stays ahead of the competition
Email marketing has long been a favourite tool among marketers for its cost effective nature and it’s hard-to-beat ROI. How is it possible, therefore that so much poor email marketing still gets deleted each day?
It’s because people think the tool is the answer. The mere fact that they are sending emails means they are doing it and succeeding. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a world where we are bombarded every day with messaging from all corners – email, phone, SMS, Facebook and much more, your solitary email has to fight hard to have a chance of standing out from the crowd.
The three words you need to remember to help you differentiate your brand are: segmentation, personalisation and testing. Any decent email marketing allows you to deliver on all three.
1. Segmentation
This is the ‘who’ of email marketing. Who are you sending your message to? Don’t say ‘all of my database’ – it’s the wrong answer. Just think for a second. Out of your few thousand people, are they really all meant to get the same message?
You need to segment your list into smaller chunks of like-minded individuals. If you have a better-targeted (although smaller) list of people, you can more effectively tailor your message to that audience. If the message is more tailored, people are more receptive to it.
Here are just a few possibilities on what you could segment on:
• Type of company.
• Type of person/job title.
• What they last bought from you.
• Age.
• Gender.
The more specific your segmentation is to your business – the better your messaging will get.
Here’s the bottom line on segmentation – it’s more work. A lot more work to do it consistently and properly. But it’s worth it when you realise how much more conversion you’ll achieve because your response rate is so much higher.
2. Personalisation
Personalisation has been around for many years now. And for many years it has been abused, implemented terribly and not taken far enough.
Ever received an email saying ‘Dear valued customer’? Seriously, if you want me to feel valued, then remembering my name would be a better start than treating me as one of all the others.
Imagine you’re in a crowded room and there are lots of conversations going on, of which you’re engaged in one. What happens when your name crops up in a different conversation? You hear it. Make sure you use this in email marketing. A good subject title uses the recipient’s name. For instance ‘Rob, are you missing out on the latest in social marketing?’ will get my attention. Address the recipient with their name and a question or evocative statement.
Great personalisation goes beyond the first-name drop though. It’s about constant tailoring of your already well-targeted message. Use any information you have about the recipient to add to the message.
‘Rob, I’m writing to you today because I know, even though you have been with us for five years, there’s more that we can help you with right now’ – doesn’t that sound great? Doesn’t it feel personal? It’s not difficult to know when someone became your customer and insert that into your email marketing. You can bring your company ahead of the competition with just a little bit more work.
3. Testing
Finally, the most obvious of all. Test your messaging. Every single email marketing campaign you send should bring you closer to achieving a better return.
It sounds obvious but split-test an email with different subject lines. Send the same content in both. Which subject line pulled a better response? Was it: ‘Rob, you could save 20 per cent on your accounting bills’ or was it ‘Rob, you could be wasting thousands of pounds this year’? You can then learn what motivates your recipients.
Each time you send a campaign, decide on something you will test. The subject line, the email content, the website landing page, the image in the email – anything. Some tests will show a big difference, some will show no difference at all. The point is, you will always learn something you can use in a future campaign.
Email is not a silver bullet
In the end, successful email marketing is the art of recognising that good marketing of any kind comes down to well-targeted, engaging messages. The only way to target properly is to segment. A great way to engage is to personalise, and the only way you know whether you can get more targeted and more engaging is by testing.
Stop thinking of email as the silver bullet and start thinking of it as what it is: a delivery mechanism. The content is the key to any delivery mechanism producing response.
